Passage into history

The tunes of some of our country’s most popular songs like ‘Jeevay Jeevay Pakistan’ and ‘Aye watan kay sajeelay jawano’ play on from time to time in the minds of almost all of us. They are a part of our history and our tradition. The words to these lyrics were written by Jamiluddin Aali who passed away in Karachi on Monday at the age of 90 as a result of diabetes and respiratory illnesses. As a poet, a columnist, a travelogue writer and a contributor to the growth of Urdu in the country, he leaves behind a long legacy. Aali, who migrated to Pakistan on the last train to come across the border from India in 1947, was known for bringing the doha into Urdu, refining it and giving it a new language to prosper in. Born into a noble family of Loharu, he served as an assistant in the commerce ministry in Delhi in colonial times before choosing to live the rest of his life in Pakistan, where he travelled to along with his wife and infant daughter. In Pakistan, he passed the CSS exam and served as an income tax official.
But it is not these professional skills that Jamiluddin Aali is known for. His ghazals, geets and narratives in prose are known both for their simplicity and their beauty. He also used his newspaper columns to make people aware of the need to be closely attached to culture and to give it the patronage it required. He himself acted to do this as the chairman of the Urdu Dictionary Board, by playing a key role in setting up the Federal Government Urdu College and the Anjuman-e-Tarraqi-e-Urdu which he headed for many years. His attachment with the Urdu language was one he cherished as an intellectual with a deep attachment both to the language and to the country in which it grew. For his achievements, Aali received the President’s Pride of Performance Award in 1992, the Hilal-e-Imtiaz nearly a decade later, the Kamal-e-Funn award and an honorary D-Lit from the Karachi University. But perhaps the greatest honour that can be paid to him is the fact that his legacy in the form of his most popular poetry will live on long after he is gone, and remind us of the importance of keeping tradition alive and preventing a language from becoming redundant.